Once upon a life: Margaret Drabble

As an ambitious young undergraduate at Cambridge, Margaret Drabble was in love with the theatre as well as her director, Clive Swift. But her destiny was not, as she thought then, to become an actress...

"Cambridge in the 50s was a hothouse of dramatic activity and talent": Margaret Drabble in 2009. Photograph: Murdo Macleod
Murdo Macleod/Murdo Macleod

I look back to the year of 1958 with nostalgia and delight. I was in my second year as an undergraduate in Cambridge, living a life of hitherto unimagined privilege and freedom, surrounded by new friends, new ideas and beautiful buildings – buildings to which I gave scant attention, regarding some of the most celebrated architectural views in Europe merely as a short cut to a college rehearsal room. My social life centred on the Amateur Dramatic Club. I was in love with Cambridge theatre. I loved my studies, but I loved the theatre more.

Cambridge was at that time a hothouse of dramatic activity and talent. The literary scene was still transfixed by the inhibiting spell of the great Dr Leavis, but the ADC Theatre and the Marlowe Society had recently been revitalised by Peter Hall and John Barton , two lastingly influential directors, and my contemporaries included Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Eleanor Bron, Corin Redgrave and Clive Swift. I fell in love with Clive in my first year while I was playing an Ibsen ingénue and he a pompous vicar in Pillars of the Community. His part was unsympathetic, his performance brilliant. I watched everything he did with amazement and admiration.

In the following year, the highlight of my brief theatrical career, Clive invited me to play Electra in his production of Sartre's The Flies. This was his first (and last) attempt to take on the role of director. I agreed at once, of course, as Electra is a showy and heavily tragic part with lots of lines and some dancing about in a white dress. But in my arrogant youth I took against the authorised translation, which was indeed full of unplayable phrases like, "Well I never" and, "The devil take you," and offered to re-translate it myself, which I did. It wasn't difficult, but I can't now say whether it was any good. We had to get permission from Sartre's agent to use it, and he didn't veto our efforts. Samuel Beckett (whose Waiting for Godot had just been introduced to English audiences by Peter Hall) was much trickier about amateur and indeed professional productions of his work. Sartre clearly didn't care.

Sartre's play reworks the Electra myth from Aeschylus and Euripides, but we knew, or thought we knew, that it was based on the activities of the French resistance in Paris during the war. We also knew that it was existential. Existentialism was fashionable in England in the 1950s, and we all read Sartre and parroted the view that "Existence precedes essence." Dadie Rylands, the ageing but still cherubic protégé of Bloomsbury and the guru of Shakespeare verse speaking, could be heard to mutter, "Existence precedes essence? Nonsense, dear boy. Love precedes hate, love precedes hate."

We quoted Sartre and Camus, and more visibly we adopted the fashions of the Parisian Left Bank, where some of us used to hang about in the sidewalk cafés in the vacation, hoping to glimpse Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir. The men smoked Gauloises, the women sported Juliette Gréco hairstyles, and we all wore the cheap and becoming uniform of black sweaters with polo necks.

We were fortunate, in our 1959 production of The Flies, to have as our leading man an outstanding embodiment of existential style in the person of the extremely handsome Richard Marquand, son of Labour MP Hilary Marquand. Richard looked the part to perfection – rugged, slightly scowling, charming, romantic, a touch of the James Dean or Marlon Brando. He was also a fine performer. He gave an excellent Orestes, and I rejoiced as his incestuously inclined sister Electra, intent on murdering our stepfather Aegisthus, played with gloomy panache by Tom Rosenthal. Tom was a great thespian in his early days. I never saw his Jew of Malta, which was a year before my time, but it is still spoken of with reverence by those who did. He later became the successful managing director of Thames & Hudson, Secker & Warburg and other eminent publishing companies.

Clive found directing more problematic than acting, and he called in the experience of John Barton, who organised the choruses and gave us all much sound advice. John Bird, now of Bird and Fortune fame, wrote the music for the choruses. I know he complained in vain about the scansion of some of the lines of verse I translated. They were the lines I liked best, and I can remember one of them, which went, "Cry, the sad multitudes of our house!" That gives you the flavour of the period, I think. Bird also had the cheek to review our production in the university magazine, Broadsheet, which we all took as seriously as the Sunday Times, in a piece that began "There's no zip in Clive Swift's Flies."

We thought we were all full of zip, and destined for fame, fortune and eternal life. This was not to be. Marquand's undergraduate acting career was dazzling, but he gave up the stage to direct films, and subsequently went to Hollywood, where he made Return of the Jedi in the Star Wars sequence. But he died suddenly, shortly afterwards, in 1987, tragically young, at the age of 49. Who knows what more he would have achieved had he lived?

Those years were important to me in many ways. Clive and I married in 1960, when he was a member of Peter Hall's Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford, and the early years of my marriage were spent, by default, writing novels instead of working as an actress. I did join the RSC for a couple of seasons as walk-on and understudy, but felt I was there on sufferance. I missed the stage, but, shortly, children and novels took over the centre of my attention.

Richard Marquand remained part of my life, and in the 60s he used me as the vehicle for one of his early BBC documentaries, One Pair of Eyes. I was then a promising feminist novelist and should have known my own mind, but Richard dominated me mercilessly, forcing me to be filmed in a nightclub which I had never before attended (was this still the Left Bank mirage?), to be pictured watching a brass band for a wholly inauthentic "northern touch", and to climb up on a crane for an aerial view. I enjoyed making this film, but one of its odd by-products has been the way that clips of it pop up now and then in serious programmes about the contemporary novel, showing me in a mini-skirt cycling round Cambridge or walking round the gallery of Newnham College library. I never watch. It is all too long ago and too sad. TV programmes depend on available footage. Richard knew this then and now I know it, too.

Clive's career continued to flourish and I follow it closely, although we were divorced decades ago. He retains, as do I, a deep affection for those Cambridge days and the invaluable training they gave to young actors who were offered the opportunity of appearing in first-class plays before first-class and highly critical audiences, with the expert guidance of directors like Hall and Barton. Now, he says, such opportunities for young actors have almost vanished. Repertory companies have folded, and drama schools are wary about trying out work before the public.

The training that the RSC offered – in speech, singing, movement – no longer exists within the profession. To remedy this growing trend, and in recognition of the value of his time with the ADC, Clive came up with the remarkable concept of the Actors Centre, active now for 30 years. This venue in Covent Garden offers classes and studio space to the up-and-coming and to the established. I saw there recently a stunning two-hander in a programme of experimental new work called Ignition. The Actors Centre, like all arts organisations these days, is short of cash, but keeps going and Clive hopes the great and the good of Cambridge days will support it. The show must go on. ■

Margaret Drabble will be speaking at the Royal Society of Literature event "What's so great about Proust?" at Europe House, London SW1 on 9 December (rslit.org)